Welcome

Design

Ok, now it was decided what to make, I still needed to think about how to make it.

For a casing, I decided on an Ikea CFL-based energy efficient lamp. These things cost 5 euro per two and are about as good as the price indicates, so I didn't think twice before opening it and ripping out its innards.

For the LED, I decided on a power RGB-led from DealExtreme. It might not be the most powerful I could get, but it's cheap so it'll have to do for the experiment. I needed a power supply too. I could have taken something like a watt-less dropper, which lowers the direct 220V-voltage by means of a capacitor. These devices don't have an electrical separation between the mains input and the low-voltage output, which means it's possible to get a nasty shock when touching the low-voltage leads when the device is on. Knowing myself, I settled for a shock-less experience and decided to find a really small power supply. The DealExtreme site still was open, and after some looking around, I found a small USB-PSU which could deliver 5V at 1amp and should be small enough to build into the led bulb:

The thing costs a whopping three dollars, and I'm glad I won't be using the complete one amp it can deliver...

The remote control was somewhat of a no-brainer: I still had some nice 433MHz modules, and a USB-to-433MHz-hack I built earlier to control some wireless wall plug modules I bought a while ago. The protocol for these left some codes unused, so I decided to hijack these.

For the microcontroller I ended up using an ATTiny44. The shop I bought it from gave me SMD ones, though. Space-wise this wasn't such a bad thing, so I decided to use them. To make soldering a bit easier, I took a piece of proto-board and sliced the lines on it in two, lengthwise. Since the pin distance on the chip is half of the standard DIL-distance, I now had a piece of prototyping board I could solder the chip on:

Ok, all the needed major components are there. Putting them together shouldn't be too much of a hassle, now should it?

« Prev 2 Next »


© 2006-2022 Sprite_tm - Contact